Seedy Saigon
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008After harping on about Vietnam’s greatness for the past month or so, it was a genuine disappointment to find Saigon to be, well, gross. The area we stayed in, I forget the name and don’t have my Lonely Planet to hand, was described as Bangkok’s Koh San Road in minature, which is a huge slur on a place even before you get there and my prejudgement was running high well before I set foot on Saigonese soil. My prejudgements were to be quashed quickly though, I could barely imagine a place as seedy as I found the place to be. Rent boy’s ride the streets on bicycles shaking rattles to let people know that they are ready for hire. If you are unfortunate enough to catch one of their eyes, and considering that they stop next to your table at a restaurant and keep shaking the rattle until you look up it’s fairly plausible that this will happen, they offer a massage. By ‘offer a massage’ I mean that they come and start touching you until you tell them to go away (which of course they give the obligatory ignore too on the first request, like I’m just playing mind games and actually do want to be rubbed up by a rent-boy and I’m just saying no ‘ços Lauren’s there) It’s all very personal space invading stuff.
So we left the city for different climbs and here we are in Phomn Phen, capital of Cambodia. We’ve only really had a little explore which went quite disastrously, all we wanted was a bite to eat then return to the hotel to sleep off the 7 hour bus journey, but we ended up lost as you can get in 45 minutes. The reason for this being that the roads are all given bizarre numbers which only loosely run in any order. The road that our guesthouse is on, for example, is something like Road 115. The road running parallel to that, however, isn’t road 114 ( I checked, 114 is about 2 K.M’s north) it is instead road 232. Confusing? you bet. So we got lost, but ended up having some cheapish mediocre food. I read somewhere that thanks to both the American war with Vietnam and Pol Pot’s genocide in the mid to late 70’s along with the terrible onspread of AID’s, means that 40% of the country are under 15 years old, and it shows. There are kids everywhere. Considering the country has a stupid big population in the region of 110million, that is a whole shedload of little úns running the streets. It’s all very odd, it looks a little bit like Disney’s Pinocchio where all the children go to the island where they rule the roost and can do whatever they want. Hopefully the children of Cambodia won’t go the same way as the wooden one and his pre-pubescent mate’s though, if I remember right they all turned into asses, Cambodia just doesn’t have the infra-structure to deal with that.
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